"Über das Komische in der Musik": The Schütze-Stein Controversy

Abstract

O ut of the eighteenth-century theories of the comic emerged in the early nineteenth century two schools of thought concerning the comic in music. The ideologies of these two schools confronted each other in the Schiitze-Stein controversy, carried on in German musical journals from 1827-35. The traditional school, led by Stephan Schiitze, held that only music with literary associations (text or program) could be comic. The progressive, more Romantic school, led by K. Stein (pen name for Gustav Adolph Keferstein), insisted that instrumental music could be comic. The Romantic school had the most direct and far-reaching influence on composition through its proponent Robert Schumann. Yet the traditional school found broader support in the journals, which may indicate to some extent the attitudes of the musical public at large. This controversy was of immediate practical importance, since it affected the reception of much new music, particularly the dance movement in the four-movement sonata cycle. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the dance movement changed more radically and completely than any other musical genre. In order to verify this, one need only compare the dance movements (called or scherzando) in Haydn's Op.33 (1781) with the in Mendelssohn's Octet, Op.20 (1825). Except for their name and position as dance movement in the sonata-cycle scheme, the movements have nothing in common: tempo, meter, form, character are all utterly different; and the degree of change is all the more striking when observed against the relative sameness and sense of continuity in the first movement, slow movement, and finale. During the eighteenth century, the dance movement was increasingly seen as the focus of the comic spirit in the four-movement scheme. This perception is attributable mainly to Haydn's reputation as a comic composer, especially in his dance movements (and to a lesser extent his finales). In the nineteenth century, the comic continued to be identified with the dance movement, primarily through the title scherzo which suc-

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